Supporting those who support us

For eleven months every year, Tarsnap,
my online backup service, supports me. (Occasionally people express surprise
that Tarsnap has grown large enough to be my full-time job; suffice it to say
that business is good.) December is special: in December, Tarsnap supports
FreeBSD. Every year since 2009, I've
made donations to the FreeBSD
Foundation equal to Tarsnap's profits for December; this year I decided
that it was time for Tarsnap to become a sponsor of
BSDCan — a conference I've been
attending annually since 2005 — but the rest of the money is still
going to the FreeBSD Foundation.

Aside from my time as FreeBSD Security Officer, I'm probably best known
within FreeBSD as the guy responsible for
getting FreeBSD to run
on EC2 — like most FreeBSD development, this was a case of
satisfying my own needs, since Tarsnap
runs completely within Amazon Web
Services. One of the common problems users of virtualization systems
(EC2 included) complain about is fixed disk sizes: Rather than providing an
install image and allowing users to partition their disks, as we do for
"normal" FreeBSD installs, I provide a pre-installed FreeBSD image —
on a pre-determined size of disk. Thanks to the flexibility of Amazon Elastic
Block Store, you can always attach more disks; but there are times when
it would be more convenient to simply have a larger root partition. As a
result, I'm very happy to note that in 2012 the FreeBSD Foundation awarded
Edward Tomasz Napierala a grant to implement growing of mounted UFS and ZFS
filesystems — in the future it will be possible to launch a FreeBSD EC2
instance with a larger root disk and resize the filesystem (from inside the
instance, while FreeBSD is running) to use the extra space.

The FreeBSD Foundation has also funded development work which affects me
personally. In addition to being a FreeBSD developer, I'm also a FreeBSD
user — not just on servers, but also on my laptop. As such, I was very
happy to see Konstantin Belousov's work on GEM, KMS, and DRI to allow the
full functionality of Intel graphics chipsets to be used. While I was able
to use FreeBSD and X on my laptop previously, via the vesa driver, using
the Intel driver makes everything feel much "snappier", and also reduces the
CPU usage (since graphics are now being rendered by the GPU, not the CPU)
with a resulting improvement in my laptop's battery life.

Most of my work with FreeBSD — and a large part of why I use FreeBSD
rather than any other operating system — has been in relation to
security, and there too the FreeBSD Foundation has been recently involved,
funding Pawel Jakub Dawidek to work on two projects: one developing a
userspace framework for Capsicum-based applications, and the other for
secure distribution of system audit records. I've always believed in making
systems more secure by designing them so that even if an attacker manages
to exploit a vulnerability they lack the capability to cause serious
damage, and these two projects are a significant step in that direction.

Beyond directly funding FreeBSD development, the FreeBSD Foundation
also plays an active role in supporting FreeBSD development indirectly. One
of the most important contributions they make is by sponsoring conferences
where FreeBSD (and occasionally other BSDs) are discussed. Of these,
BSDCan is the longest-running, and is
particularly close to my heart, as I've spoken there eight times; but they
have also sponsored EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon, BSD-Day (Vienna), KyivBSD,
NYCBSDCon, MeetBSD California, and BSDday Argentina over the past few years.
While BSDCan is the only one of these I've attended, I've seen enough
discussion on IRC to know that they are all useful venues for planning out
what work needs to be done and who will be doing it; and I hope that in the
coming year I'll manage to attend at least one other BSD conference.

As I write this, the FreeBSD Foundation's "fundraising thermometer" stands
at $461,199 raised in 2012 out of a target of $500,000. This is already a
record — last year the Foundation raised $428,169, which was itself
a record — but we can still do better. Whether you use FreeBSD on
your laptop at home, use FreeBSD to run servers at work, build and sell
products which incorporate FreeBSD, or help to write FreeBSD, the FreeBSD
Foundation is helping to support what you do; if you haven't done so already,
maybe you should consider
supporting the great work
which the FreeBSD Foundation does.